First Look: Gottlieb Target Pool and adjusting stepper units

I’ve been on the lookout for more 60s-era Gottliebs with the small flippers. We don’t have hardly any in the collection and after hearing Bowen Kerins say “Target Pool” was his favorite game from the 60s, I knew I’d made the right choice in picking this machine up. Unfortunately, I never turned it on or checked it out electrically/operationally before I bought it. But I could see the game was complete and the seller said it did work. This was one of those times where I knew I was going to get it any way. So here’s the first look so far, a playlist of 3 video clips covering the initial examination of the game, and finding out what’s wrong and fixing some issues. This is a good example of how to fix certain problems with stepper units.

If you watched the previous story on the Target Pool you may see the same first-two videos. I am keeping them all together in case someone sees this story by itself. If you’ve watched some of the videos in the series before, just hit next on the player to skip to the next video.

Fixing multi-player game problems on 70s era Gottlieb EM Pinball Machines

The other day one of my games stopped working.. A Gottlieb “300” 4-player EM game. What was happening was it would only do 1-player games and not any 2-3-4 player games. I don’t know if it had been not doing it for awhile since I usually play just one-player games but it wasn’t working. I checked various things and ended up being stumped. Clay gave me a few suggestions and eventually we narrowed the issue down to a stepper unit near the front that ratcheted from 1-2-3-4 players. Duh! This video series is pretty embarrassing, but hey, that’s the way it goes… at least I fixed it…

You’ll notice in the first video in the playlist, I’m basically describing the problem, and then for the second, I’m already well into tearing the culprit stepper motor apart. I don’t remember if I lost part of the video series, or (more likely) I felt like I should have caught this myself and not needed help so I quickly dived into it before I realized some others might benefit from my trials and tribulations.

EM game gets stuck on one ball and does not advance? How to fix it.

Today I finally got a chance to set up a game I purchased last year and brought back from Houston. A 1976 Williams “Space Mission” EM game, the theme centers around the Apollo-Soyuz link-up in 1975. This game exhibited a somewhat common problem, of the ball not advancing and being stuck on “ball one” over and over, so the game would never end. In this series of videos, I illustrate what causes this and how to fix it.